Coffee & TV: $1 coffee, The Wire
Welcome to the 29th installment of my newsletter about my two very favorite things in the world.
The day before Christmas my mom and dad, Mary, Matt and I squeezed together in front of the webcam of my mom's laptop and called my brother Andy on Skype. Andy is in the Air Force/National Guard and was sent to Kandahar on active duty in October, because that is what we do with National Guardsmen now? Except we're also pulling them out soon? Who knows! Certainly not those responsible for foreign policy and military strategy in our great nation. The buildup to Andrew's deployment was scary and stressful, but we've Skyped with him a few times since he left and he seems fine. Good, even. He grew a goofy kinda-cute moustache. He works 12 hour days six days a week (or something similar) and when he's not working he goes to the gym, because there is nothing else to do. He gets a lot of sun and can't drink and his skin is, like, enviably glowing from within. Take that, beauty bloggers!
It obviously isn't in a guidebook but the best coffee at this Air Force base is being served by my little brother out of his bunk/shipping container to his comrades in arms at $1 USD per styrofoam cup using the equipment and beans we, his family members, provided via international shipping (incl. kettle, burr grinder, french press, two Yeti tumblers, and several pounds of artisanal coffee). Of course there are always these illicit commercial activities happening in the military/prison/rehab/whatever, but it was still funny and semi-shocking to hear. I had visions of chewed-up be-ringed styrofoam cups drifting in the desert winds and suggested that he might offer a discount for those bringing reusable cups, because in my family I am That Liberal Snowflake. Matt and Mary immediately offered an analysis of how such a discount might impact his bottom line, but then I pointed out his operating expenses are completely subsidized by us and everything he makes is pure profit, reusable cup discount or not. We all had a good laugh over that. I guess a bunch of non-biodegradable cups are far from the worst things we've left in Afghanistan.
Andy told us attacks on the base have increased leading up to the holidays, which apparently is normal and expected. I asked what happens during an attack and he explained the procedure. For the first two minutes after the warning you are supposed to take a brace position on the floor, eyes closed, arms and legs crossed, mouth open. Why mouth open? someone asked. Because apparently the pulses following an explosion can really fuck up your teeth and jaw if your mouth is shut. Then after the two minute warning bell, you get up and start doing your station checks. Andrew explained what everyone did on the base and it really seemed like the guys who are in the tactical units - who have to go the the POO and POI sites (point of origin and point of impact) are the ones who take casualties and Andy isn't one of those. He pronounced POO phonetically, as it is done in the service. Going forward I will keep my annoyance at the overuse of acronyms at my place of employment in perspective.
We talked about work in general after that and Matt and Mary both mentioned their recent promotions. I will never be promoted but instead of keeping my mouth shut and letting everyone else enjoy their accomplishments I said I had recently written a piece for Buzzfeed about the TV adaptation of My Brilliant Friend. "Cool!" Andy said. "Yeah, just google 'Ruth Curry buzzfeed' and you'll find it!" I said. I felt a flash of brief unease, like maybe I had forgotten to turn off the stove.
The next morning my mom said she had read my article and thought it was interesting.
"Oh really?" I said. "I'm surprised it made any sense if you haven't read the books or seen the show."
"What show?" she said.
I felt my stomach fill with hot quicksand. If you google "ruth curry buzzfeed" and just click on what comes up first you won't get my wonky TV review, you'll get the essay I wrote about moving to New Zealand and I should have known that before just throwing out search terms in front of my parents like an idiot. I never talk about my writing or really anything important at all with them; they have google and know how to use it and in the absence of any feedback whatsoever over the past 10 years I am 99% sure we are operating on a 'don't ask don't tell' basis, in the full sense of that expression.
"Oh, you read the New Zealand essay," I said. "I don't want to talk about it."
If only I could have printed out these tweets and handed them to my mother! Instead I huffled back to my childhood bedroom and took too much cold medicine.
Once in bed I thought through the essay section by section from my mother's perspective. It wasn't really too bad, as I recalled. Sex occurred rarely and offstage. There was a lot of drinking on stage, but, well, whatever. Our family starts drinking around two during the holidays. Foul language only in direct quotation. Nothing about god or religion or politics that I could remember. It was really -- I thought of the Portlandia sketch -- a document of misery. I briefly considered reading it again just to check but I have an aversion to everything from that period of my life. I'm an obsessive ruminator but that relationship, those years of my life, and their aftermath is the one thing I have successfully trained myself not to think about. I would rather delete my photos/erase music/stuff papers way back in the closet/reroute my thoughts, sort of like avoiding an intersection where you've had an accident before.
Unfortunately I was sick and bored, away from home with none of my usual coping mechanisms available, and burdened with the adjacent concern of having given my mother access to the rawest excesses of my inner life. (The fact that I am okay discussing these with strangers on the internet but not my parents is a topic for another newsletter/encyclopedia/therapy session).
"It wasn't all bad," I say at some point in that piece. Lying in bed ten years later with the heartbreak and aimlessness of the interim easily accessible and feeling sorry for my sinus-infected and emotionally labile self, I felt most of it was in fact pretty bad. I thought of a picture of me and my ex that I had always returned to as proof that he really loved me. He's looking at me, delighted, smiling; I'm in profile, looking at my shoes. I had probably just told a self-deprecating joke. Or maybe he was making fun of me. To my vision under its current prescription his expression read like the joy of possessing something cute and fun, not the pleasure of laughing with someone you cherish. What won't my depressed brain ruin? on the one hand, but on the other, this is the person who once got mad at me for leaving the mattress on the living room floor all day instead of considering how fucked up it was he basically made me live somewhere too cold to sleep in the bedroom.
I am trying to salvage something and I can say we really did enjoy watching The Wire together. Have you heard of this show, The Wire? Now that Game of Thrones has jumped the zombie ice dragon, I think it's safe to say The Wire is uncontested in its status as Best Show of the Current Millennium. (The Sopranos is too baggy in the middle and not issue driven enough for a Serious Critic.) 'You come at the king, you best not miss' but also:
my unpopular opinion: season 2 is the best season and I will fight about it
Gather around children, and I will tell you about The Olden Days, before streaming media, and if you and your SO didn't own a television, you would enjoy prestige cable dramas by renting them one full year after they aired live, one DVD at a time, from a local bricks-and-mortar DVD rental emporium. A DVD is a storage medium for electronic files and you used to be able to put them into computers. So what you would do is, you would rent the DVD for between $1 - $5 (depending on if it was a new release or not) from an actual physical store, ride home on the bus, change out of your work uniform, wait for your boyfriend to come home, and then watch it in bed on his IBM laptop which you balanced on your adjacent legs. You jammed the audio on the tinny laptop speaker up to 100 because Bluetooth hadn't been invented yet, and you would agree to watch two episodes and then go to bed, but often you watched all three, and sometimes, you would reveal to him that you had rented THE FOLLOWING DVD as well, and he would look at you with love and admiration and you might even watch four episodes before falling into bleary sleep. The next day you might watch two more without him and be surprised he got upset. The rules of binge-watching a TV show as a couple were not yet codified.
I won't be offering any further commentary on The Wire at this juncture, as the internet really fully has this one covered. But I will note that, should you be in the unfortunate position of trying to date men online, name dropping The Wire is a reliable indicator that a man has really only done the bare minimum of voting-for-Obama work surrounding social justice issues (he also will not have watched Season 5), and that (potential Jeopardy question) the park that makes appearances in both Serial and The Wire is Leakin Park.
Even after I finally took leave of my dumpy sad memories something still felt off about the days surrounding Christmas. The day before I returned to New York I realized I had been waiting to feel the gust of cold air coming through the front door that meant Andy had finally arrived -- he was usually the last of us because of in-laws or military stuff -- and that it would not be coming this year. I wondered if, during the time I was gone, my family had unconsciously waited for that same whoosh that would accompany my arrival. Is it weird to hope so?
Until next time,
Ruth
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